researching the Laplace transform. Doetsch advocated an "appropriate and purely Aryan representation of Germans" on the editorial board of Compositio, a magazine for which he had been a board member at one time along with Reinhold Baer, Ludwig Bieberbach, Georg Feigl, Heinz Hopf, Alfred Loewy, Richard von Mises, John von Neumann, Wilhelm Suss, and Gábor Szegő. He would come under scrutiny eventually for his pacifist past, and by 1937 his support for National Socialism waned. World War Two With the outbreak of World War Two, Doetsch returned to the Luftwaffe as a captain in 1939, serving in the Reichsluftfahrtministerium. There he was in a leadership role and coordinated mathematical war research. In 1941 he was given the task of creating an institute to apply mathematics to economic and military matters in the Third Reich. By 1944 he had transferred to Institute for Theoretical Ballistics at the Aviation Research Institute. Later years After the war he was suspended from his position at Freiburg, and denied retirement privileges in 1946. He was reinstated to his chair position in 1951, where he would serve ten years, isolated from the rest of the faculty, before retiring in 1961. During this time he completed further literary works, including Handbuch der Laplacetransformation in 1955, Einführung in die Theorie und Anwendung der Laplacetransformation in 1958, and Anleitung zum praktischen Gebrauch der Laplacetransformation in 1961. He also completed Funktionaltransformationen in 1967. Doetsch died on 9 June 1977. Publications Theorie und Anwendung der Laplace-Transformation, Berlin 1937 with Dietrich Voelker: Die zweidimensionale Laplace-Transformation. Eine Einführung in ihre Anwendung zur Lösung von Randwertenproblemen nebst Tabellen von Korrespondenzen, Basel Birkhäuser 1950 Handbuch der Laplace-Transformation, 3 vols., Birkhäuser, Basel 1950, 1955, 1956 Einführung in die Theorie und Anwendung der Laplace-Transformation, Birkhäuser 1958, 3rd edn. 1976 (English trans. 1974) Anleitung zum praktischen Gebrauch der Laplace-Transformation, 1961, 3rd edn., Springer 1967 Funktionaltransformationen, in Sauer, R.; Szabó, I. (eds.) Mathematische Hilfsmittel des Ingenieurs, Springer 1967 References 1892 births 1977 deaths Scientists from Cologne People from the Rhine Province German Roman Catholics 20th-century German mathematicians German Peace Society members Academic staff of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg Academic staff of the University of Stuttgart German Army personnel of World War I